In the technical fabric sector, on the one hand there are a wide variety of woven fabrics made with weaving machines for flat-woven fabrics, wherein the warp and weft threads are formed by yarns or groups of filaments in the form of a yarn whose cross-section tends to be circular.
The complexity of the woven fabric in which a warp and weft are formed by rectangular cross-section tapes having parallel filaments is an area which can be explored, which in the future will result in multiple developments that improve the current technique of the woven fabrics made from tapes and the machines that make said woven fabrics. Document ES2372411T3 describes the fact that by replacing the threads of the traditional warps and wefts of the textile by flat tapes having a rectangular section, the machine for processing them is completely different.
There are not many precedents of machines that produce woven fabrics manufactured from flat tapes. Reference should also be made to the aforementioned document ES2372411T3 which describes a biaxial flat-weave fabric manufactured from tape-type parallel filaments wherein one weft can vary the angle formed in relation to the warp. These machines differ in their design of the looms for textile yarns due to the fact that when the tape is handled during the process, there is an additional component to be considered; the position of the tape must always be flat and not rotate, a component that is completely omitted from conventional textile looms as it is not necessary. Notable evidence is that a conventional loom for spinning yarn can never process tapes because of the parts it contains or because of the weaving process.
On the other hand, in the technical textile sector and due to the high performance currently provided by fibres such as carbon fibres, paramedic multifilaments, fibreglass etc., there is a need for fabrics referred to as ultralight fabrics, namely, the weight of the woven fabric is minimal in relation to its surface and when these types of high-performance fibres are used, the result is a woven fabric that has high mechanical properties and which is very lightweight. Therefore, to obtain such ultralight woven fabrics, the warp and weft yarns, which are two parallel multifilaments having high performance fibres, must first be processed in a cross-section which tends to be circular to a rectangular section having a very small thickness and a considerable width.
For example, a group of carbon fibres having a circular cross-section (though not regular) composed of 12,000 filaments, is previously transformed into a tape of parallel fibres 20 mm wide by 0.03 mm high. Said tape can be treated with binding elements to provide cohesion to its structure as a tape and can be handled as such.
When the yarn is turned into a flat tape where the geometric component of the width and surface of the tape appears, woven fabrics can be constructed wherein this component is also taken into account and can be related to and conditioned with other dimensional aspects of the woven fabric such as the angle of the weft relative to the warp and the distances between consecutive weft and warp tapes.
In respect of the construction of the woven fabrics, the biaxial tape fabrics absorb stresses in four directions in which both the weft and warp are oriented, and when said directions need to be increased, said woven fabric is overlapped with another biaxial woven fabric having different directions, although the weight component per unit of surface of the final packaged structure is compounded as a disadvantage.